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Back in my Peace Corps days, I was in Southern Africa. One curious compliment to a woman there (crude, to my way of thinking)° was O morago o motona which means "You have a big ass." Generally I believe the anthropological thinking is when a culture is in lean times, the big folks are attractive because that signals access to the eats. In the bountiful era, a slender frame rather suggests you have the resources to push away from the plate of Twinkies because you know there will be more if you want them, whenever.
°I also once heard a man say to a colleague of mine, a young woman new to the school: O mabele o montle, tla ke anye which means "You have nice tits, let me suck them." Of course this was a big dude and he could and did say whatever the hell he wanted most of the time in that world where brute strength ruled pretty much everything.
I don't know how accurate any of this is in terms of human psychology but it makes a certain amount of sense.
Africa is the exception, really. Sub-Saharan Africa has several attested cultures where being fat was seen as attractive, such also existed in Arab countries at times.
Even today, bigger body size is seen as desirable in US black culture, at least if we go by this NYT opinion piece where a woman is complaining how black men don't want them to lose weight..
Black Americans have a distinct sexual dimorphism around weight that isn’t found in other racial groups. The men have approximately the same obesity rate as men of other races (black men actually have very slightly lower obesity rates than white men on some charts, but the difference is negligible), but black women are much more obese than women of other races.
For example white men and white women have an obesity rate of 38%. Black men have an obesity rate of 37%, while black women have an obesity rate of 55%. This also likely explains why black American men date interracially more than black American women.
This kind of dimorphism is also found in Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Yeah I meant in the US, sorry for not clarifying; it’s not uncommon in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, although strangely it isn’t universal even there (some Bantu populations seem to have much more even obesity rates). I’d also add that there might be a difference between societies in which women are more obese (perhaps because they’re more sedentary) but in which the ‘beauty ideal’ is still relatively skinny and societies in which men’s preference is actually for overweight women.
From what I know about Azeris, they do prefer dump truck bottoms.
Same is thought to be true in Arab countries. They like large butts at least.
Interestingly, and this is something I'd research if I ever got better executive function, fatness might have been seen as sexually attractive in the eastern med area between at least 1000 to 1900. There's complaints of imams dated to cca 1200 that 'rich Egyptian women eat bread after dinner to get fatter, and some are so fat they pray sitting down, not kneeling'.
Two Czechs went on a car ride in 1932 to Kandahar, through Turkey. It's an interesting book- interior of Turkey was basically middle ages still, they went in a sports, not all-terrain car. However, they mention approvingly, as an aside, that fatness was just coming out of vogue in coastal Turkish cities. ???
Also heard from a friendly jewish extremists that he talks to bedouins in his area and they seem to like the 'mattress' body type - large & soft and less likely to wander around.
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